Dumont's Hadewijch at the London Film Festival 2009

Twentynine Palms gave us a dysfunctional couple to rival the more recent duo at the centre of von Trier’s Antichrist. In the eyes of its director Bruno Dumont the film was a kick against puritanism. In his latest, screened last night at the London Film Festival, Dumont's central character is a young woman intent on devoting herself to Christ as a nun. Thwarted from taking her vows by a mother superior who suspects that in her acts of self-denial and mortification there may be an element of self-love, the novice is requested to ‘return to the world’ where by virtue of encounters and chance occurrences she may find her ‘true self’ as well as discover other ways to come closer to God. Céline is known to one of her convent colleagues as Hadewijch, ostensibly the name of her place of birth, but one of the more basic of the many interpolations of the thought of the 13th century Dutch mystic and poet which help shape the film’s discursive terrain.

With the director’s characteristic Bressonian mise-en-scène and with the film’s many evocations of Bresson, Dreyer and Rivette, Hadewijch is also imbued with a strong sense of climate, temperature and light. Those familiar with Dumont’s previous work will be forgiven for dreading the woods which lie between her convent and a place of frequent pilgrimage in a nearby church – a grotto with a statue representing the entombed Christ – as a place of violent encounter in the non-convent world. It does not turn out to be the case, however. Indeed these same woods are later the setting for the conversation which will in fact find the devotee coming closer to God. The God, however, to whom she draws near is the divine being characterised by manifesting himself in his absence, as explained to her by an amateur Muslim theologian, Nassir, whom she meets having been befriended earlier in a cafe by his younger brother Yassine. As the questing acolyte suffers more and more the withdrawal of the Christ she wishes to love, and whose body she needs, she draws closer to the discourse of the man, as she does physically to both him and his brother. They are in effect the conduits allowing the becoming-manifest of the divinity, and it is for this reason that Céline feels compelled to express dawning sexual desire for Yassine (in the banal context of a pause while the fries cook in the deep-fat fryer). The world to which she has returned is, it transpires, one she has never been in to begin with. Her father is a government minister and the family live in a vast house in the Ile St Louis, while Yassine lives in the HLMs. Her Christ is coveted within spitting distance of the Notre Dame, while Yassine’s brother holds court in a room entered through a kebab shop. These polarities may appear at first sight heavy-handed, but when Céline as part of her ‘conversion’ (which the film presents as a continuation), visits the Lebanon with the brother to witness first-hand the ‘humiliation’ which in his worldview demands violent response, it is clear that Dumont views them as prerequisites for the film’s strategic ambivalence to operate. Céline should not become a martyr, the nuns advise at the film’s outset. Despite a momentary suggestion in the film’s denouement that she has in fact acted as a suicide bomber this does not occur at either of the poles of belief which her own religious faith can, without contradiction, occupy. The final scenes make manifest the withdrawn threat of violence which earlier scenes had asked us to associate with a construction worker working on renovations at the convent by showing us the builder back out of prison after his 3 months re-incarceration (for an unnamed infringement of his parole). As rain pours down he climbs down the ladder with bare torso facing the camera a stricken and inconsolable Céline is observed in the convent grounds with his customary ambiguous interest. Another young nun takes Céline to shelter in the greenhouse where the silent man also stands. When she leaves the grotto having berated her Christ for forcing her to pursue him and for constantly evading her ever more painfully she descends through the woods once more. Plunging to an attempted suicide by drowning the final encounter of the film is between the emerging Céline and the saving intervention of the builder. Her joy is expressed and his misshapen teeth form a smile. Religion constructs the image of the other as one wants the other to be, but often does so with the space of the other eradicated, bracketed off, annihilated. In this final encounter with the faces looking past each other in embrace Dumont shows us a world, a return to the secular world, which is always insistently and devastatingly unrecognizable.